Time Out For Reflection On Cloning

There is nothing so urgent about any such effort that it would be hurt by waiting the 90 days it will take for the National Bioethics Advisory Commission to study and report on the matter. Indeed, if mainstream scientists are to be believed, no reputable member of the scientific fraternity would consider attempting such an experiment anyway.

But what about disreputable scientists? For all we know, some renegade in a white smock is even now manipulating cells in a petri dish in an effort to clone himself or some other member of Homo sapiens.

Clinton's Tuesday directive assures at least that such manipulation will not be supported by the federal government. And if the scientific establishment heeds his call for a moratorium on privately financed cloning, it should assure that it will not happen at all.

"My own view is that human cloning would have to raise deep concerns, given our most cherished concepts of faith and humanity," Clinton said, giving voice to the inchoate sense of unease that many people have felt since a Scottish scientist announced in late February that he had leaped a major scientific barrier by cloning an adult mammal, a sheep.

What is it about the prospect of human cloning that unsettles a people who have learned to be casual about artificial insemination, egg donation, surrogate motherhood and in vitro fertilization?

Leon Kass, the University of Chicago bioethicist, suggests it is the recognition that cloning, to a greater extent even than in vitro fertilization, would turn human reproduction into a matter of manufacturing. Couple the ability to clone adults with the developing ability to mix and match genes and you have man--or woman--in the disturbing position to play God.

Add to that the loss of diversity in the species that cloning would cause. It is by the combining of gene pools that the human species has evolved and improved over the generations and the centuries.

Maybe as disturbing as anything else is what cloning would mean for relationships among humans. Sexual reproduction requires relating to another person in the most intimate possible way--and in the process fulfilling some fundamentally human aspect of the self. Cloning would relieve individuals of the need to be intimate, isolating them in a fundamentally inhuman way.

"Any discovery that touches upon human creation is not simply a matter of scientific inquiry," Clinton said. "It is a matter of morality and spirituality as well." Well said.